Poison -- a thread for the lovers and the haters

at that time, they are so resolutely bubblegum that I find it hard to people don't like them...no machoness to get in the way of all the pop hooks...also, I luv CC Deville as a lead player, much more tuneful and less wanky than lots of the era, and when he was wanky it had a certain "hey ma look what I can do!" gooniness that is infectious....like he didn't take it seriously enough to really think of it as anything more than making cool noises....and CC's voice! I mean best speaking voice ever! He sounds like some cigarrette inhaling, grizzled 50s New Yawk diner waitress! (and looks like one too!)

Also, I was in Jr. High at the time and have many fond memories of all the girls in my grade dancing to them at school dances. they were really good for that.....

All this said, they got worse and worse every album, more "serious" and less fun and they thought they were like a real band or something...with some exception like "every rose" and the gooooorgeous and melancholy springsteen thang "fallen angel" (which no one seems to like as much as I do)...

M@tt OTM.

They're the Yellow#5 of Rock.

Rikki Rocket I kiss U!

I HAVE ERECTION!

So in summation, um, Poison: no good.

Thank you for casting your votes.

The Flaming Lips (back in their better days) dedicated two songs on their Oh My Gawd.... album to C.C. Deville.

(making jackoff motion)

?! really! Were they being funny or were they admirers?

"The C.C. in the 'Ode to C.C.' songs is the guy in the band Poison..?? I still think he's great!..." Wayne

Don't do crack, it's a ghetto drug

By the way, in order to be completely unironic from now on, you might want to not call somebody unintelligible in a sentence where you use incorrect grammar: IT'S 'YOU'RE', YOU FUCKTARD!

uh, did it ever occur to you that db and myself may have actually have heard of the NY Dolls and listened to them and be quite aware of their influence on the look of glam rock and might just actually want to talk about Poison without some toolbox bothering us? Fucking find a NY Dolls thread if you want to talk about them....or fuck there's prob. even five threads on solo David Johansen by now if that's yr bag...

god, you have this way of making these completely banal and cliched observations and then acting like you're the first person on earth that's ever said it....

Assume uh = x = a troll. Act accordingly.

You, like the other peons on this board, are really good at drawing inferences that aren't there and making stupid assumptions. But keep on, you're amusing me. :)

x-post

Seriously, uh, get off the crack.

It's easy to categorize and thus distance yourself from something, right? Well, carry on then, if your ignorance makes you feel better.

you idiot.

I mentioned the New York Dolls as an aside, since they did the whole sleaze-drag thing earlier than Poison did the whole OMG WE'RE WOMEN thing. But since you all take everything entirely too seriously here, I'll figure you missed that too.

fyi, this is the only nick I've used in the last four days other than "censored" to my knowledge.

HI DERE

Anyway, Let Us Now Praise Famous Rocketts:

http://www.musicmayhem.com/rikki9.jpg

Poison's haters might enjoy seeing Bret Michaels get flattened by some scenery at the Tony Awards:

http://www.queerty.com/the-tony-awards-talking-point-bret-michaels-falls-on-his-ass-20090607/

the close-up view is better IMO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JocPcYBCN18&annotation_id=annotation_823724&feature=iv

loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

gotta love that fade

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1613466/20090608/bret_michaels.jhtml

still love that just blaze remix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM43vA3BjQw

It's just really entertaining the way he's like, swaggering back while we all watch this thing descending straight onto his head

(I feel for the guy with his broken nose and all, but I hope he'd agree that if you are going to break a nose in a mishap like this, it might as well be as hilarious as possible for everyone else's enjoyment)

Also it should happen at the Tonys. The lead singer of Poison should get injured at the Tonys

lolz followed by Stockard Channing?!?

Well DONE

it is quite nearly a perfect storm of hilariousness

also it is a warning to fans of hair-metal: you think Broadway is lame? yeah well those people know how to HIT THEIR MARKS

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20363506,00.html?hpt=T2

^^brain hemorrhage btw

Poison decreases sperm count.
They're the Yellow#5 of Rock.

― uh (eetface), Wednesday, May 5, 2004 8:29 PM

???????

LOS ANGELES – Bret Michaels is in critical condition suffering from a brain hemorrhage, his publicist said Friday. Joann Mignano confirmed a report on People magazine's website Friday that said the former Poison frontman was rushed to intensive care late Thursday after a severe headache. The report said doctors discovered bleeding at the base of his brain stem.

Mignano said tests are being conducted and that no further information was available.

The 47-year-old reality TV star had an emergency appendectomy last week after complaining of stomach pains. He said on his website that though the surgery "has taken its toll," doctors expected him to make a full recovery.

Michaels starred on the VH1 dating show "Rock of Love" and is a contestant on Donald Trump's NBC reality show, "The Celebrity Apprentice."

Trump said in a statement Friday that he was "deeply saddened" to hear of Michaels' condition.

"He's a great competitor and champion, and I hope he will be fine," Trump said.

are any celebrities safe?

"The 47-year-old reality TV star" i know Poison are pretty forgettable but c'mon now, give him some respect while he goes through this.

Livin' my life, sin after sin...oops.

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/936808_3190062848406_226890525_n.jpg

Mah eyes!

Not a bad chorus in search of better trash.

Talk Dirty To Me is pretty decent but man this is a terrible band. Bret Michaels is a corny enough frontman to make Mark Slaughter look like Marc Bolan.

open up and say arse

Oh my god look what the feral cat that lives in the backwoods where Mandy was a documentary dragged in.

This is what C.C. Deville from Poison looks like now?! He looks like he's in a band I would possibly go see?? pic.twitter.com/zTTsH8iPtw

— Nacho Man Sandy Cabbage (@TreeBeerd) June 6, 2022

make sure to tape the setlist to his forehead and put a mirror in front of him

Maybe him, Kip Winger, Jeff Pilson and Bobby Blotzer are starting a new Cascadian black metal project.

hey Rikki Rockett!

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/rikki-rockett-homophobic-rock/?fbclid=IwAR2f8kfB_t3LiqQ8hwIGEfy7JIDSQ7xDVE8Yj3A9a0yJdHjpXs4sdQNZNfY

kinda cool to see from someone who theoretically has a lot more fear of pushback from his audience than most

“What we were doing was a social, cultural movement,” Rockett recalled. “It really set America and the world on fire in a lot of ways”

Um

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AelpbAegA-4

Just rediscovered Fallen Angel, a song I haven't thought about since the late 80s. The video makes it even better with the expression on dude's face after our protagonist kicks him in the nuts.

What a pretty girl.

3:22 for the dick kick, 3:28 for the aftermath

These poor fallen angels, moving to California and ending up in Poison videos.

Fallen Angel video is v funny. every time she steps of the titular bus out into the titular city street I think of cute hayseed Axl stepping off the bus in the Welcome to the Jungle video

Lotta stepping off busses in 80’s music videos

In the video, a young blonde (portrayed by model Susie Hatton, then Michaels' girlfriend) tells her family, at dinner, that she is leaving for California at the end of the week

lol I'm imaging the pestering Bret got from Susie about getting her into one of their promos

idk I pictured the opposite, like he is the one bringing her everywhere & putting her in everything so that the whole world knows he landed a megababe

He seems more that guy imo

I know I've mentioned this before, but I interviewed Michaels once many years ago. Genuinely nice, down-to-earth dude, still got a lot of rural Pennsylvania in him. (Being a diabetic helped him keep his head together because when you've got it the way he has it, anything beyond the occasional beer will fuck your shit up for real.)

Counterexample: Stephen Pearcy. Funny as hell, but clearly not a nice guy at all.

That’s what I mean! He’s small town enough to show off a girlfriend; he’s not bigtiming & making girlfriends beg to be in his videos

I watched many seasons of Rock of Love, I too know this man ;)

veg otm. alfred otm too, what a gorgeous woman. video is extremely charming. poison were fitted out. love that pink guitar.

At the opposite end of the spectrum & literally end of the line for them chartwise is this unhinged (?) / of its time (?) video for Stand (1991)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3hmgkPYUuk

The video makes it even better with the expression on dude's face after our protagonist kicks him in the nuts.

― peace, man, Saturday, August 1, 2026 2:54 PM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The creep in the video was played by Anthony James—the iconic grinning chauffeur from Burnt Offerings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rECWgLmhUc4

Began and ended his career in Oscar Best Picture winners, In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Unforgiven (1992). Can't be many actors that can be on that list.

He was also in the first western Eastwood directed, "High Plains Drifter," but I mostly know him from one of the Naked Gun movies. Work is work, but it must be tough to have Resting Creep Face. Jackie Earle Haley knows.

I feel Tom Werman has softened over the years on the question of whether Poison could play at all, but this interview still indicates the state of play with all the money floating around for the guys who fit the suit back then

god I had completely memory-holed that video. which i now remember having watched many, many times. Bret Michaels' red leather.. gauntlets? is that the word? And the ostensibly feminist cautionary story doesn't neglect to show us a few cheesecake shots in the studio. Which of course 13-year-old me was, er, extremely there for. Sexist degradation: One woman's sizzling hot tale!

Oof:

You produced the band’s seismic Open Up and Say…Ahh! record, which I believe was the first and only album that you recorded digitally. What prompted that decision?

Tom: Because I knew, having seen the band and rehearsed the band, that we would be doing a lot of punching in.

Good interview. That's not the first time I've heard stories of insecure hard rock drummers of the '80s calling in Bun E. for help. Iirc I read an interview with Cinderella's drummer in Modern Drummer around the era where he said even when the band was riding high he was taking drum lessons from Bun E.

Wild to hear that Jay Graydon played on "I Want You to Want Me," never thought about it before!

there's harsher interviews about poison out there from a producer or a mixer, or maybe a label guy. like, there's people who say "none of those guys could play at all"

But they still had to tour, right? Like, here's a video of them from 1988:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsQ32e1Q2C4

They sound ... fine? About as well as I would expect a band like Poison to sound, or need to sound, which is really the crux of it: the best they're ever going to sound is like Poison.

It’s usually CC that gets the most “couldn’t play” laid at his feet

That producer blames it on drugs, though. It's kind of like saying the Replacements couldn't play. They definitely could, just not after drinking a million beers, etc.